This week in Memphis history: November 8-14

By Bill Dries

1963: Mass immunizations against polio using the new Sabin oral vaccine began in Memphis and Shelby County

1933:The Tennessee Brewing Co. reopened for the first time in 15 years with the first bottles of Goldcrest beer, brewed and bottled in Memphis, delivered to stores by the Memphis company. The final state necessary to ratify the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the amendment that repealed the 18th amendment and ended national prohibition, would not approve the amendment for another month. But a Tennessee Constitutional convention had ratified the amendment in August.

Source: “Finest Beer You Ever Tasted” by Kenn Flemmons

1923: On Election Day in Memphis, incumbent Mayor Rowlett Paine beat Joe Wood, the mayoral candidate of the Ku Klux Klan, by less than 5,000 votes in an election that political boss E.H. Crump stayed out of until the day before the polls opened. That’s when Frank Rice and Joe Boyle, Crump’s political right arm and the city’s police commissioner, respectively, showed up at Paine’s campaign headquarters. The only candidate on the Klan ticket who won was Cliff Davis, the secretary to Paine that Paine had fired just before the election. In a 1957 interview, Judge Lois Bejach said he witnessed polling officials reading names off the paper ballots that were different than the ones selected by voters. Bejach said without the election fraud more Klan candidates would have won.